Anyone in the Elixir community running Github actions / act successfully?

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Hi all, not an Elixir specific question, but hoping for a favourable signal to noise ratio if I ask it here.

In theory it is possible to run a Github Action locally, for example before performing a git push to pushing to their server. There are many potential reasons to do so, reduced context switching, reducing failed build noise, etc.

Anyhow, the project GitHub - nektos/act: Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀 appears to offer this functionality, the idea being, it’s executable runs your github workflow on a local docker image. However, in practice, it seems to be downloading 40GB of container layers every time I run a workflow.

I’m just wondering, before going on the deep dive, is anyone in the Elixir community actually running it successfully, or if not, is there a working fork, or, has anyone used anything similar to run github actions locally, or should I just move on and accept this is a waste of time?

Thanks

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You could always run git hooks locally, they are quite flexible and easy to set up and don’t depend on github.

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Oh, indeed, but I’m looking for fast cycle debugging of actual github actions (mostly erlef/setup-beam@v1 stuff, but also some occasional weirdness around coveralls (paths) and stuff like that. I’m not just looking to run mix test or the basic stuff.

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You could use dagger.

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Or earthly.

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Interesting, so the suggested optimisation around GitHub clunky CI / lack of local reproducibility seems to be to add a portable CI independent wrapper which can be run locally, in GitHub CI, or presumably on the providers cloud build system. I can see the attraction, particularly as many teams seem to be jumping back and forth between GitHub, Gitlab, Google, etc.